Now I associate the Romans with pretty much organization, orgies, arches and plumbing and thats it. Roland Barthes got it gaily back to haircuts and sweat. There was certainly not much progress over one thousand years with say, clothes. A thousand years and your still wandering around in a bedsheet!
Of course, our poxy little period runs far too fast and still doesn't know what the hell it is doing apart from buying faster car to do it in. I figure we will best be remembered for armaments, pornography and drugs, the three cornerstones of our so called 'economy' (if we are remembered at all). Certainly, we enter a new Dark Ages precisely because we are deluded, hypnotized, by feelings rather than thought.
Yesterday I was looking at photographer Joel Sternfelds excellent latest book 'I Dubai' it's just a collection of photographs of 'us' taken on a mobile phone in Dubai, largely in a shopping mall or twenty. We don't come out of it too well.
I was also 'reading' Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Well lets just say I grazed the introduction, it's so long I wondered 'Just HOW will I read this? There just isn't the time!' Sure, because no doubt I'd soon be distracted by Simon fucking Cowell or some other bit of nonsense. No wonder I lay in bed this morning staring at the ceiling trying to slow down time.
Never mind old son. All the horrors of the times in which we live, may be cured by a photo shoot with an Essex girl in her bath. Trust me, I know this to be true.
ReplyDelete